Jabberwock

Stalag 17, and Billy Wilder’s understated cynicism

2009-11-22T19:54:00.002+05:30

I used to think of Billy Wilder primarily as a very witty, literate screenwriter who made sophisticated, Lubitsch-like films. But re-watching Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17 recently, I was reminded again of how hard-edged Wilder’s sense of humour is. Of course, there was never any denying that he made some very cynical movies (most notably Ace in the Hole, which anticipates the evils of today’s media in its story of a reporter exploiting the situation of a man trapped in a cave). But because Wilder is such a clever writer who constantly comes up with lines that make you smile, and because his dialogues are so layered and fast-paced, requiring full concentration, you can sometimes lose sight of how dark some of his material is.

Take Stalag 17, a film about American prisoners of war in a German camp (or stalag) a few months before the end of the Second World War. The main plot involves their realisation that there’s a stoolie in their midst who smuggles information to the camp commandant; the finger of suspicion points at the unsocial Sergeant Sefton (played by William Holden) who spends much of his time trading with the Germans for special privileges (a few dozen cigarettes in exchange for a precious egg, for example).

The effect of this film is different from that of the obviously absurdist anti-war comedies – movies like Altman’s M*A*S*H* and Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. The deliberate, over-the-top lunacy of those movies paradoxically makes it easier for us to see how serious-intentioned they are. Army surgeons cracking jokes while digging about in the bleeding innards of their doomed patients? Mushroom clouds spreading gracefully across the earth’s surface while a gentle Vera Lynn song plays in the background? How can this not be ironical? But Stalag 17 is harder to figure out, because its tone is more realist and because, in a couple of scenes, it steers close to making POW life seem like one long buddy picnic. There are Christmas trees, there is much hurrahing to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again”, there’s a bit of fooling about with a genial prison guard, a bit of volleyball, and some ogling of the Russian women prisoners across the barbed wire.

Consequently, you might think this film is a bit flippant or at least that it’s somewhat sanitised (which it probably is, but that has more to do with the fact that it was made in 1953 than anything else). After all, when we think of Nazis as captors we reflexively think about the horrors of the concentration camps: we don’t think about the fact that the Germans would probably treat white American POWs towards the war's end at least marginally better than they treated the Jews. (In this case, being too nuanced is a step away from being callous. There’s something distasteful about a film depicting a German prison guard as genial, even if a few such men might actually have existed.) [Note: for a clarification of what I'm trying - unsuccessfully - to say here, see Feanor's comment and my reply to it.]

But despite its few instances of soft-pedalling, Stalag 17 is a very thoughtful movie. It never really allows us to forget its opening moments, when two prisoners are coolly shot dead by German guards while trying to escape, their bodies left to lie in the slush the next day while the camp commandant smilingly explains that “fortunately your companions did not get very far – they had the good sense to rejoin us”. And there are, in fact, a couple of scenes that seem to point the way forward to M*A*S*H*, which was made 20 years later in a more permissive Hollywood. In one scene, after the prisoners are given copies of Mein Kampf to read, they stick Hitler moustaches on themselves and make faux-speeches in a pidgin language that combines random German words (or German-sounding words) with American slang. “Everything is Gesundheit, Kaputt and Verboten! Is all you indoctrinated? Is all you good little Adolfs?” (Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John would have been proud.) In another scene, one of the men receives a thinly disguised Dear John letter from his wife, informing him that she found a baby on her doorstep, that it has her eyes and nose, and that he must believe her.

The execution of the two wannabe escapees is filmed matter-of-factly, much like the gangland massacre scene in Wilder’s Some Like it Hot - there’s no underlining the tragedy of the moment, no stretching it out or dolling it up with sad music; that’s not the Wilder way. And there’s an immediate cut to a shot of Sefton, collecting his winnings – a pile of cigarettes – because he’d bet the other prisoners that the two men wouldn’t make it out of the forest. Naturally this isn’t the sort of thing that would endear him to the others, but he’s only measuring the risks and being practical. As he tells the other prisoners, “Let’s say you DO escape this place and get back to the States. They’ll just ship you out to the Pacific, put you on another plane, you’ll get shot down again and end up in a Japanese prison camp this time. Well, I’m staying put and making myself as comfortable as I can.”

It’s an impressive anti-war speech, but in the context of the story it also indicates a selfishness in Sefton’s personality. Subsequent events allow him personal growth. When he finds out the identity of the real stoolie, he’s in a position to milk the knowledge for personal gain, but he makes another choice instead. And it’s typical of Wilder’s style that this is depicted as unsentimentally as possible, without turning Sefton into the Hollywood Hero who saves the day.

P.S. More on Wilder’s wry treatment of death. My Sunset Boulevard DVD has audio commentary by Ed Sikov, who wrote a book about Wilder, and from it I learnt that the original opening of the film was a scene set in a morgue, where the corpse of Joe Gillis (the movie’s leading man, also played by William Holden) engages in conversation with other dead bodies. But during a preview screening, audiences laughed so hard at this scene that Wilder had to come up with something different: hence the macabre yet beautiful shot taken from the bottom of the swimming pool in which Gillis’s body floats as policemen try to fish it out and newsmen take photographs.

In Bhima’s voice: M T Vasudevan Nair’s Randaamoozham and Prem Panicker’s Bhimsen

2009-11-15T18:31:00.001+05:30

[I’ve written earlier on this blog about Prem Panicker’s Bhimsen series; here’s the text of a story I did for Business Standard Weekend]

The literal English translation of the Malayalam word Randaamoozham is “next in line”. Slightly extended, it might be used to describe someone who is perpetually second best, forever the bridesmaid, and this made it a particularly apt title for M T Vasudevan Nair’s acclaimed retelling of the Mahabharata in the voice of Bhima, the second of the five Pandava heroes. Next in the line of succession to his elder brother Yudhisthira (and usually in the shadow of his younger brother Arjuna when it comes to charisma and skill in warfare), Bhima comes across as a gluttonous, slightly oafish he-man figure – or a comic foil – in many mainstream renderings of the great epic. But Nair (popularly known as “MT”) turned him into a three-dimensional figure, more sensitive and thoughtful than he is usually given credit for. “He took familiar building blocks and created an entirely new, incredibly compelling construct from them,” says Prem Panicker, senior journalist, Rediff.com co-founder and a long-time admirer of MT’s work.

When Panicker first read Randaamoozham as a youngster, it helped him realise that “the stories that made up the warp and weft of my ‘heritage’ are open to interpretation”. Returning to the book years later, he was struck by the nuances a familiar tale could yield if you changed the perspective even fractionally – “like a kaleidoscope, where every time you gently flick your wrist, strange and wonderful patterns emerge from the same broken bits of glass”.

A little over a year ago, he embarked on a whimsical, experimental project that quietly grew into a robust literary work: an English transcreation of Randaamoozham, serialised under the title Bhimsen on his very popular blog Smoke Signals. The series is now complete – it runs to 72 episodes and 135,000 words – and available in PDF format on the website. It’s an outstanding work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in an intimate, earthy version of the Mahabharata – one that places us right amidst the characters.

“Perspective tellings” of this complex, multi-layered epic are not, of course, new things. Many notable books and plays in this vein have been written in all the major Indian languages – Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay (Marathi), Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni (Oriya) and P K Balakrishnan’s Ini Nhan Urangatte (Malayalam) being just three among them – but unfortunately for the English-language reader, hardly any of these are available in high-quality translation. This makes Panicker’s Bhimsen an especially important work, one that remains deeply respectful of the original Randaamoozham while at the same time confidently building on it. It isn’t a straight translation. Using the blog-post format meant that Panicker had to carefully work out how to begin and end each chapter, which is a different process from flowing a story over the uninterrupted length of a book; each episode had to be relatively self-contained. He also drew on his own understanding of the Keralite martial arts tradition to embellish the descriptions of Bhima’s many hand-to-hand combats. And he expanded on the frequent tensions between the Pandava brothers, for Randaamoozham, as he points out, is at its heart the story of a family struggling to survive.

As a reader, if you come to Bhimsen having previously encountered only mainstream translations of the Mahabharata, there are two important things you have to deal with. First, this is not an omniscient-narrator telling: everything we read is filtered through the prism of Bhima’s personal experiences, his very particular biases and prejudices. This seems like an easy idea to process, but a reader who knows the Mahabharata well must keep reminding himself of it. It’s revealing to read the comments on Panicker’s original Bhimsen posts and note how frequently he got asked to add an extra sentence or two elaborating incidents that Bhima wouldn’t have had direct access to (“More details on the Abhimanyu killing please”) or justifying the behaviour of another character. A recurrent subject of such requests was Karna, who is presented here almost throughout as a negative figure, rather than the tragic anti-hero so many of us Mahabharata aficionados admire. But as Panicker shows us, when we are looking exclusively through Bhima’s eyes, it’s perfectly natural to view Karna as nothing more than an arrogant, mean-spirited low-caste man constantly trying to rise above his station in life by ingratiating himself with Duryodhana; an outsider meddling in family affairs and adding to the trouble. Other perspective tellings will, of course, present completely different pictures, which add up to create a fascinating tapestry, for these subjective renderings go a long way towards helping us grasp character motivations and appreciating the many moral complexities of the story.

The other thing to understand about Bhimsen is that there is no room in it for the supernatural or the divine; everything is explained in strictly realist terms. Thus, when the young Bhima is poisoned by Duryodhana, he doesn’t enter a magical snake kingdom at the bottom of the river and receive nectar that will grant him the strength of 8,000 elephants – instead he meets a tribe of Nagas, who heal and fortify him before sending him back home. Most of the “rakshasas”, such as Bhima’s wife Hidimbi and son Ghatotkacha, are similarly tribal-folk, people who exist on the fringes of the kingdoms that make up the narrative (and who are not particularly well-treated by the epic’s conventional heroes). Karna’s “Shakti”, the irresistible, one-use-only weapon supposedly gifted to him by Indra, is described with careful realism as an arrow that contains freshly extracted snake venom, therefore guaranteed to kill (and not replaceable because the warrior would have to carry a basket of live snakes around with him on his chariot!).

There are references to the Pandavas being the sons of Gods, but in his brusquely pragmatic way Bhima de-mythologises himself and everyone else, dismissing the bards’ songs as fanciful public relations exercises. (I could never listen to balladeers sing of my battle against Bakan without feeling the urge to laugh out loud. They called him an asura and invested him with all kinds of magical powers... but the battle itself was merely a matter of killing someone who needed it – a quick, clean kill with nothing to recommend it in terms of strategy and tactics.) Towards the end of the story, his mother Kunti even tells him about the human men who fathered her sons.

What this approach does is to flesh out the quotidian aspects of the great epic, making it more relevant to readers who don’t think of mythology as literal truth (and who aren’t very interested in its religious significance) but read it for what it tells us about human beings and their conflicts, about the everyday bustle of life. But it would be a mistake to think of Bhimsen as a radical, new-fangled attempt to “modernise” or “deconstruct” the Mahabharata. In fact, it draws on the earliest forms of the epic poem – notably the much shorter text called the “Jaya”, which we know about largely through references in other ancient literature, such as Bhasa’s plays, written around the 3rd century AD. In the afterword to Randaamoozham, Nair wrote that he stayed philosophically anchored to this “original version” throughout.

This is not to say that a minimalist Mahabharata is intrinsically more worthy or valid than the grander, more fantastical one that most readers are familiar with. Both have their uses and both have something to tell us about the long, fascinating process by which myths are generated and regenerated over time. But at a time when religious fundamentalism has become almost fashionable, when some people take chauvinistic pride in the idea that a sacred text has existed in exactly the same form for thousands of years, it’s important not to forget how old stories grow and change over time. After all, Randaamoozham is also a reminder that the particulars of myths vary as you travel from one part of this vast country to another. “MT brought to his narrative a Kerala-centric appreciation of interpersonal relationships within a rigidly hierarchical family structure, such as that of the Nair tharavad where the pre-eminence of the eldest male is the guiding rule,” says Panicker. This informs the relationship between Yudhisthira and the other Pandava brothers.

In her excellent book The Hindus: An Alternative History, the Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger explores the vitality of Hinduism and the fact that its major texts have been subject to reinterpretation over the centuries, not set in stone. There is no better example of this than the Mahabharata, and Bhimsen is a worthy addition to the ever-growing canon of this dynamic epic – as well as a fine tribute to a modern classic of regional literature.

The complete text of Bhimsen is available here.

[Will soon put up the text of an email conversation I had with Prem about Bhimsen. Meanwhile, on a related but much lighter note, some old posts about Ekta Kapoor’s delightfully muddle-headed Kahaani Hamaari Mahabharat Ki, which was telecast for a few months last year before it died with the channel it was on: The tattoo menace, The squabbling sutradhaars, More on Vyasa and Ganesha, Little princes with big pecs, Low comedy from the Dwapara Yuga]

Notes on Paul Theroux's A Dead Hand

2009-11-13T20:46:00.000+05:30

Just finished Paul Theroux’s new novel A Dead Hand, which features a Theroux-like narrator-protagonist – Jerry Delfont, an itinerant travel writer currently living in Calcutta, looking for a story, and suffering from a bad case of writer’s block or inertia. He has an impressive opening paragraph (or what he thinks is an impressive opening paragraph) that compares the city’s atmosphere to a bulging vacuum-cleaner dirt-bag, but that’s about it. In other words, he has a “dead hand” – “it seemed a true description of what I was facing, a limpness akin to an amputation” – and being middle-aged, he worries that this might herald a permanent decline.

But there’s more than one kind of dead hand in this novel. The other, more literal manifestation emerges soon after Jerry is approached by an American philanthropist, Mrs Unger, who asks him to investigate an incident involving a little boy’s corpse in a dingy little hotel room. Initially unwilling to get involved, Jerry finds himself besotted – in ways that he can’t fully articulate – by the enigmatic, maternal yet sensuous Mrs Unger. He also discovers that there’s nothing in the least dead about her hand: an almost magically skilled masseuse, she soon has him under her thumb, in more than one sense.

Paul Theroux himself isn’t the sort of author who you’d think struggles much when it comes to filling a page with words: he’s remarkably prolific, having averaged around a book a year for the better part of four decades – this includes the travel writing for which he is best known, as well as fiction that frequently draws on his experiences of traveling and living in different lands. He’s a polished, fluent writer – the quality of his prose is better than one usually expects from genre fiction (and A Dead Hand is very much a genre thriller). As in previous books, notably The Elephanta Suite, he has a way of capturing little things about India that might make Indians bristle – and even lead to accusations of an outsider being patronising or promoting stereotypes – but which have the ring of uncomfortable truth about them. “As I was leaving,” says Jerry at one point, “I heard him shout – a bawling in Bengali, the sort of rage I’d heard before in India, uninhibited indignation, pure fury, always a man screaming at a woman.” And this, when referring to certain middle-class Indians whose English combines grammatical incorrectness with a florid over-formality that suggests the colonial legacy: “They had the language for every occasion. It was still possible to be subtle, even sinuous, in a conversation, probably as a result of the weirdly Victorian verbosity, using politeness and amplification and elaborate excuses and courtesies.” On yet another occasion, Jerry says that “India’s human features” frighten him, but then speculates that “I saw doomed people where [Mrs Unger] saw life and hope, because I was doing nothing and she was bringing help.”

Also present here is some of the exoticising that so raises the hackles of many of us Indian readers - references to Tantric sex and Kali worship, for instance (see on left the international cover I found on Amazon.com, a Kali with a stylishly skewed third eye!). Of course, one mustn't confuse narrator with author: Jerry is given to painting with much broader brush-strokes than Theroux himself would. But he can certainly be seen as a version of Theroux, perhaps a more callow version. Or perhaps a lazier, less ambitious version, the sort of man who would hide behind the façade of “writer’s block”. This parallel is underlined for us midway through the book – in a passage that doesn’t take the main narrative forward but is very intriguing on its own terms – when Jerry has a brief meeting with the travel writer “Paul Theroux”, who happens to be visiting Calcutta. During the course of their exchange, we get a vivid, cynical image of an inquisitive writer as someone who pokes a wary animal: “It was not only cruel, but the torment evoked an uncharacteristic and untrue reaction.”

Despite thoughtful passages like this, A Dead Hand has a peculiarly rushed and unfinished feel about it. The book’s target reader would seem to be someone who simply wants a cosy little Oriental mystery (the subtitle “A Crime in Calcutta” suggests as much), and in this sense it never quite satisfies. Early on, when we learn that Mrs Unger’s largesse extends to rescuing and caring for some of the city’s huge population of orphaned children, it isn’t too difficult to guess the general direction where the story is headed, and I kept waiting for a twist that would add a new, unanticipated dimension. However, this never quite happens; the book doesn’t seem to want to be a conventional whodunit (or whadhappened). But in that case, what is it? Is it more about slowly unwrapping the many veils that conceal the real Mrs Unger (something one can’t be sure Jerry has succeeded in doing by the end of the book)? Or is this inscrutable woman an elaborate symbol for Calcutta – and, by extension, for India? A Dead Hand raises these questions but leaves them dangling in the musty air of the dirt-bag.

Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (and a sidenote on homosexual Nazis in 1940s films)

2009-11-09T18:52:00.000+05:30

Watched my DVD of Jules Dassin’s prison film Brute Force last week (and before you ask, I had no idea then that Madhur Bhandarkar’s latest exercise in social awareness, Jail, was about to be released). This is a very gripping movie, right up there with I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke in its genre. It’s widely seen as a commentary on the brutality of prison life and the need to make conditions more humane, but personally this wasn’t the aspect of the film I found most interesting. For starters, it’s difficult as an Indian viewer in 2009 to properly appreciate the reformist aspects of a 1947 movie set in Westgate Penitentiary, or to fully understand the context: there’s the disconnect that one frequently experiences while watching an old film about a social issue that has become either obsolete or changed in vital ways over time.

Secondly, I didn’t think the reformist stuff was the main strength of the film anyway; the characters are a little too simply drawn for that. There’s one all-out bad guy – the sadistic, upwardly mobile prison warden Captain Munsey, as smooth and repellent as a silkworm. He’s superbly played by Hume Cronyn, but the character is written as a caricature and a symbol: he’s so deplorable that the film pointedly associates him with both homosexuality (gasp!) and Nazism (he listens to Wagner records while beating up prisoners with a rubber truncheon that isn't just a rubber truncheon!).

In the opposite corner are six prisoners led by the handsome, brooding Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster). They share a cell and plan a breakout together, but they all seem more victims of circumstance than hardened criminals – ill-suited to any sort of jail, much less an overcrowded, unhygienic one supervised by Gay Hitler. The other authority figures are weak foils for the single-minded Munsey, who believes in ruling with an iron thumb, though there IS a benevolent doctor who briefly stands up to him and generally serves as a sutradhaar figure at the end.

For me, the strengths of Brute Force lay not in the message-mongering or the use of characters as symbols for ideologies but (clichéd though it sounds) in the sheer skilfulness of its storytelling: its low-key, mostly realist treatment of daily life in a claustrophobic, cut-off setting; the relationships amongst the prisoners (including the veteran Gallagher, who runs the in-house newspaper and who reminded me of Morgan Freeman’s stoical Red in The Shawshank Redemption); and the beautiful black-and-white photography with the many little nods to Expressionism (there’s a wonderful opening shot of the prison drawbridge in the rain, and a great silhouette of a suicide in his cell, his distinctive glasses dangling prominently from his nose). Other fine touches include the poster of a woman’s face in the cell where the break-out is planned; more a mask, an abstraction, than a real woman, this photograph is very different from the large Rita Hayworth poster that plays such a key role in The Shawshank Redemption. But it represents different things to each of the residents of Cell 17, reminding them of the girls waiting for them back home and of the circumstances that led them to prison.

In one of his first films, Burt Lancaster is a great physical presence – as he was throughout his career – but he also gives a surprisingly solid performance, many years before he started making conscious efforts to become a Serious Actor. In one of the many (slightly melodramatic) flashback scenes that give us background information on the prisoners, there’s a wonderfully performed moment where Joe’s girlfriend, an invalid, wonders aloud if people are good to her because they feel sorry for her. “I’m not 'people'. I’m Joe Collins, one guy” says Joe tersely, before quickly kissing her and getting up to leave. It’s the sort of tough-talk you expect from noir heroes of the time, but Lancaster brings a low-key realism to it, and that little moment tells us more about Joe than lines of exposition could: particularly his fierce individualism, which might end up hindering the getaway.

Jules Dassin is a director whom I always associate with the best qualities of film noir, though he worked in other genres too. My favourites among his films, Rififi and Night and the City, are taut, economical movies with hardly a superfluous shot in them. I’d place Brute Force just half a rung beneath them.

P.S. Another pleasing little connection I discovered between two very different types of movies: around the same time that Hume Cronyn was playing the fascist Munsey, he was co-writing the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Rope, the two young murderer-protagonists of which are also associated with both Nazism (through their espousal of Nietzsche’s Superman theory) and homosexuality. John Dall, who plays Brandon in Rope, strongly resembles Cronyn in this film - both physically and in his slightly effete way of talking. I had a vision of Cronyn (as screenwriter-cum-actor) performing scenes for the younger actor during rehearsals.

'Continents' revisited: meeting Ved Mehta

2009-11-05T04:52:00.001+05:30

[Did a version of this profile for Tehelka]

“Most of us experience our parents as authority figures, we don’t think of them as human beings,” says Ved Mehta. We’re discussing his books Daddyji and Mamaji, now republished in graceful new editions by Roli, with Krishen Khanna paintings on the covers mirroring the quiet refinement of the prose within. “It’s hard to imagine one’s parents having hungers, fears, problems of their own. For me, this was a way of humanising them, and I hope readers will get something out of that.”

“Secretly,” adds the 75-year-old author, “I hope they’ll also get pleasure from their literary value.”

It would be very surprising if they didn’t. Daddyji and Mamaji, both written in the 1970s, are intimate personal histories of Mehta’s parents and their forebears, but they are also explorations of changing worlds and ways of living, from the provinciality of village life in mid-19th century Punjab (where a journey to Haridwar, lasting several days, could become the achievement of a lifetime – part of a family’s corpus of oral myths passed down over the generations) to “Daddyji” travelling to England to study in the early 20th century. These were the first two books in a large, initially unplanned cycle of autobiographical works that eventually became known as the “Continents of Exile” series. Most of them were published to acclaim in the US, where Mehta has spent much of his life, yet they continue to have a low profile in India; even immediately after the publication of The Red Letters in 2004, it was difficult to find copies of the earlier books in most stores.

This is a pity, for Mehta is among the most distinguished Indian writers of his generation. Over a career that stretches back to the 1950s, he worked as a staff writer for the New Yorker for three decades and wrote features and books on contemporary India, Mahatma Gandhi, philosophy and theology. He has also written with pragmatic clear-sightedness about being blind (the result of a bout with meningitis at age four): about how, “being a donkey in a world of horses, one would have to justify one’s existence and worth to the horses”; his journey to America at age 14 for the well-rounded education that wasn’t available to an unsighted adolescent in India; how loneliness gradually made way for self-reliance; and his use of “facial vision” (the ability to sense objects by the feel of the air and differences in sound) to navigate the world around him.

But his defining work remains “Continents of Exile”, which began with the simple, unassuming desire to record the story of his father’s life. “My father was a great storyteller – maybe that’s how I ended up becoming a writer – but with seven brothers and sisters clamoring for his attention, I rarely got him to myself,” he tells me. “Once that finally happened, in New York, I asked him to repeat the old stories he used to tell us. Initially it was mainly for my own edification. Then I started taking notes, and the book developed.”

“I had no real long-term agenda, but creative projects gather their own momentum,” he continues, “After Daddyji was published my sisters said I had to write a book about my mother next. She was very reticent at first but she finally agreed to be interviewed when my father wasn’t present!” The books grew to tell a vast cross-cultural tale involving India, England and America, revealing a great deal about a time when Indians first started moving to other countries in large numbers, breaking cultural strictures against crossing the oceans, tearing themselves away – or being torn away by circumstance – from family, friends and culture. One of the dominant themes of the last century, as Mehta points out, was the huge displacement of people around the world. Naturally, this shaped a literary landscape too. “The word ‘exile’ usually has negative connotations, but it has produced such great literature,” he observes, recounting the works of Nabokov and Conrad among others – and quickly adding “I’m not comparing myself to any of these names!”

Writing several books about one’s family history and one’s own personal development can sometimes be dismissed as navel-gazing – possibly one reason why Mehta’s place in the pantheon of leading Indian Anglophone writers doesn’t seem as secure as those of his contemporaries like V S Naipaul and Anita Desai – but he had the conviction that “if you write a very specific story and write it well, it will have a wide resonance”. He was so adept at using small stories to cast light on a big picture that his mentor, the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, developed a new rubric – “Personal History” – especially for his profiles. Mehta smiles as he recalls “how absurd it was, right in the middle of the Vietnam War, for a leading American magazine to publish a three-part profile of my mother, who no one in the world had ever heard of”.

The lucidity and precision of Mehta’s prose – Shawn once described it as “airy, elegant, marvellously clear” – may have been honed at the New Yorker, but Mehta himself believes “it originally came out of the impulse to tell people who I was, where I came from – I had a lot of explaining to do, and there was nothing more important to me than clarity. When I wrote Face to Face in my early twenties, I had very little English – I wrote it as a letter, I scarcely knew I was writing a book, it was more like recalling my background for myself”.

More intriguingly, his writing is very visual and descriptive. Determinedly avoiding any reference to his blindness except when it’s integral to the narrative, he writes as if he can see, and in a memoir this can be disorienting: what to make of a passage where Mehta “watches” as his father opens a large trunk and takes out “an empty Harrod's plastic shopping bag and a packet of letters in envelopes of many sizes and colours, loosely tied with a string”?

“Perhaps we shouldn’t compartmentalise fiction and non-fiction so strictly,” Mehta counters when I raise the subject, “Even in old histories there are passages – descriptions of soldiers in war, for instance – that are slightly heightened to make them more immediate.” He recalls that once, after interviewing a well-known historian who smoked throughout the duration of their talk, he wrote, “He smoked from the side of his mouth; there were times the cigarette seemed stuck to his lower lip.” The startled interviewee wrote asking how he had known this. “But I had simply interpreted what I heard – the patterns of his speech – and put it in visual terms,” says Mehta, “I could have written ‘His voice sounded muffled, which led me to conclude that the cigarette was dangling...’, but that would have been cumbersome and distracting. I don’t write for blind people, I write for the general public, and I don’t want to repeatedly draw attention to my blindness by explaining my impressions of thing.”

Making his own way around the world of reading and writing on a daily basis isn't an easy task, however. Since many of the books Mehta wants to read aren’t available in Braille or in talking-book format, he usually has to rely on readers, and this can be an expensive business (in his college days he would pay fellow students 75 cents an hour for their assistance; rates have risen considerably since then). He’s managed well enough – he finished Vikram Seth’s immense A Suitable Boy in just three to four days, less time than most sighted people would take – but it’s difficult for him to closely follow new literary developments as they happen. When he speaks of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (which he holds in very high regard) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (“I liked it but it wasn’t an easy read at all, it was very convoluted”) almost as if they were recent publications, I realise that he has to be very selective in his reading, relying mainly on recommendations of “important books”. “I can’t always read books as soon as they are published,” he says in a resigned tone.

When I ask him to sign my copy of Daddyji, he scrawls a rough “V.M.” under the book’s title and lets his wife Linn write the short dedication. “As you can see, I’m functionally illiterate,” says the man who has filled thousands of pages with explorations of the interior lives of individuals as well as the shifting histories of continents.

[An old post on The Red Letters here. Also see Ved Mehta's website, which contains many of his essays and shorter pieces, as well as information on his books.

And some earlier author profiles/interviews here: Mohsin Hamid; Vikram Chandra; Amitav Ghosh; Anita Desai; Rajorshi Chakraborti; Kiran Desai; Manjula Padmanabhan; Manil Suri; Edward Luce; Amitava Kumar; Sudhir Kakar; Raj Kamal Jha; Kiran Nagarkar]

Millennium 3: The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

2009-10-30T08:04:00.000+05:30

“It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands that there were many pages to go, many adventures to share” – critic Roger Ebert on the comforting bulkiness of J R R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

And so the English translation of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest brings Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium trilogy to its close. I turned the last page of this book feeling deep satisfaction as well as melancholy, the latter emotion compounded by the knowledge that there will be no more sequels (Larsson died of a heart attack shortly after completing the three manuscripts, totaling nearly 2,000 pages) – unless, of course, it turns out that the publishers have been withholding information from us. (Doubtful but fingers crossed!)

An epic series usually follows a trajectory that leads from the small picture to the large; the first book tends to be relatively intimate, establishing the key characters and their immediate setting, and then, as the series proceeds, a fuller, grander canvas unfolds. (Which first-time reader, encountering Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first birthday celebrations in the cosy Shire, can possibly anticipate Sauron’s forbidding wasteland of Mordor, much less the vast mythological landscape of The Silmarillion?) This is how the Millennium trilogy played out. The first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, began as a standard-issue thriller, centering on the investigation of a 40-year-old murder, but soon journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his research-assistant Lisbeth Salander (a.k.a. the girl with the dragon tattoo) discovered that this was a fragment of a much larger puzzle involving ritualistic killings and a trend of violence towards helpless women immigrants. The darker undercurrents of life in contemporary Sweden stood to be uncovered, including corruption and sleaze in big corporations, and the limp-wristed collusion of financial journalists.

The sullen, anti-social but frighteningly efficient Salander was the most interesting character in this novel, but her back-story really took centrestage in the second book The Girl who Played With Fire, which was even more ambitious in its cast of characters and range of subjects – the story involved an extensive exposé of the Swedish sex-trafficking industry, the murder of the enterprising young writer who was to carry it out, and the revelation of a connection with Salander’s early life. The girl who played with fire was now officially in the eye of the storm.

The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest picks up at exactly the point where its predecessor dramatically ended, with Salander, a bullet lodged in her head, admitted in the critical care unit of a hospital. Though soon out of danger, she is still a suspect in three murders and a high-profile trial awaits. Meanwhile, Blomkvist – who isn’t allowed to meet her in hospital – must work against time to unearth the details of a three-decade-long cover-up by an organisation within the innermost circle of the Swedish secret police. (Hence the book’s clever title, which evokes the closed hives of secret agents.) Other parallel strands involve the activities of an aged former “spook” named Gullberg, the increasingly hectic professional life of Blomkvist’s best friend and former Millennium editor Erika Berger as she tries to cope with a new job as editor-in-chief at a daily newspaper, and the independent investigations conducted by authorities who are partly sympathetic to Salander.

Larsson’s novels are very detailed and full of information about the workings of, for example, magazine and newspaper journalism, the police force and big business (to this list, we can now add the morally ambiguous world of spies, their activities so shadowy that they are often hidden even from the upper echelons of government). In fact, it’s possible to offer the mild criticism that they are too detailed, sometimes to the extent of being flabby. Some of this probably has to do with the circumstances of their publication: if Larsson had lived to discuss them with his editor, I think some of the deadwood would have been eliminated. Much as I enjoyed the first two books, more than once I got the impression that he had written the manuscripts mainly for his own pleasure (the self-indulgence does work in places, such as the cameo appearance in the second book of the real-life Swedish boxer Paolo Roberto), not really worrying about tightening them for eventual publication; and that his publishers, excited by their potential, had rushed them into production and translation after his death. I thought the second book in particular could comfortably have lost eighty or so pages.

Happily, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is much more focused than its immediate predecessor, and a genuine page-turner all the way through. After establishing the background in the initial chapters, it kicks into maximum gear once Blomkvist (somewhat implausibly) manages to smuggle in a hand-held computer – along with Internet access – to the incarcerated Salander (who, as we already know, is an expert hacker with an army of anonymous online contacts). This is where the book really delivers: once Salander has that computer, she is as omnipotent as Salman Khan in Wanted. There’s nothing she can’t achieve, and a point arrives, around three-fourths of the way through this 600-page novel, when the reader realises with a warm flush of excitement that everything is going to turn out all right, that the bad guys are going to get their comeuppance and that we’ll have the satisfaction of watching them squirm.

You might think that such an epiphany would be detrimental to the effect of a thriller, but this isn’t the case here: the suspense in this book isn’t so much a matter of what will happen but how it will unfold. Besides, with a character as moody and anti-social as Salander, you can be sure that things will never be allowed to get too comfortable or happy. She remains an enormously compelling protagonist even when she spends much of the book physically immobile, and it’s a pity that we won’t get to see the further twists in her complex relationship with Blomkvist. On the other hand, perhaps the legacy of the Millennium books will lie in their not being extended into an endless, ultimately compromised series. Three novels usually aren't enough to secure an author's place in genre-fiction history, but this is what Larsson has achieved, years after his passing.

[An earlier post on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Swedish crime fiction here]

Coetzee channels Coetzee: Summertime

2009-10-28T19:52:00.000+05:30

[Did a version of this review for The Hindu]

The central premise of J M Coetzee’s Summertime is that the South African writer John Coetzee – a Nobel laureate, author of such novels as Dusklands, Foe and Disgrace – has recently died in Australia and that a young Englishman named Vincent is trying to write a book about him. However, Vincent’s book is a limited, even whimsical undertaking: it will focus only on the mid-1970s – a time when Coetzee was living with his aged father in the suburbs of Cape Town – and it won’t be a comprehensive biography so much as a collection of impressions gleaned from five people who knew Coetzee to varying degrees during this period.

These people include a Brazilian dancer named Adriana who believes that Coetzee was attracted both to her and to her young daughter (whom he taught English), a married woman named Julia, with whom he had a liaison, and his cousin Margot. Summertime consists largely of their recollections – including a narrative rendering by Vincent of what Margot tells him – and the portrait that emerges of Coetzee is an unflattering one: a dull, asexual, socially awkward, self-absorbed man. One respondent describes him as a sphere, a glass ball, because "there was no way to connect to him...he wasn’t made for love, wasn’t constructed to fit into or be fitted into". "He was not a man of substance," says another, likening him to a block of wood that has neither rhythm nor soul. He is variously derided or pitied.

Inevitably, the discussions reveal at least as much about the interviewees themselves as they do about Coetzee. One woman insists, somewhat shrilly, that John was nothing more than a peripheral character in her grand life-story; another uncomfortably wonders why Vincent wants to know so much about her life when the book should really be about John. The question of why a celebrated author’s life should inherently be of more value or interest than the lives of “ordinary” people runs through Summertime, as does the question of whether one should even attempt to “understand” an author outside of what his work tells us about him.

Vincent has with him excerpts from notebooks maintained by “John Coetzee” in the 1970s, excerpts where the author (speaking of himself in the third person) hazily reflects on the troubles of his country and on his own lackadaisical attempts to achieve immortality through his writing. “Why does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?” At one point Vincent explains that he doesn’t want to rely on his subject’s diaries and letters, because “he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity...if you want the truth you have to hear from people who knew him directly, in the flesh”.

To which one of Vincent’s interviewees asks, “But what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any worthier of credence than what he tells you himself?” As a reader, it's possible to get so involved with passages like this that you might briefly forget that Summertime is written by (the real-life) J M Coetzee, who is very much alive, and that Vincent and his respondents are the fictional creations. I found this happening on more than a few occasions.

So what is Summertime, really? It’s been widely described as a "fictionalised memoir”, and at times it reads like an exercise in masochism, a harsh self-examination that is dismissive not only of the man but also the writer. (“He had no special sensitivity, no original insight into the human condition,” says one of Coetzee’s colleagues, “Nowhere in his work do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium to say what has never been said before.”) The reticent Coetzee in this book could be a version of the real-life author (who is known to be reclusive and unsmiling), but some important details don’t match: the real Coetzee was married and had children at the time, for example. And there’s no particular reason to believe that the interviewees are based on real people.

For all these meta-complexities, this is best treated as a novel that eventually tells us as much (or as little) about Coetzee as his other, more obviously fictional books do, and with all the qualities that mark his best work. Coetzee has never been known for richly descriptive prose, yet his writing, through its interiority, vividly depicts a place, a time and a mood (in this case, the inertia of life in the African veldt). Despite its spare structure and conversation-driven narrative, Summertime is a book of ideas, full of reflections not only about the relationship between an artist’s life and his work, but also about the functions, possibilities – and limitations – of literature itself. It’s a reminder of how difficult (perhaps impossible) it is to satisfactorily transform the complexities of human experience into words on a page (“Something sounds wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it. All I can say is, your version doesn’t sound like what I told you,” one of “Coetzee’s women” tells Vincent). And it’s both ironical and entirely appropriate that this reminder comes from someone who does it better than most others.

Laughton as Rembrandt: notes

2009-10-25T15:06:00.000+05:30

In his excellent 1944 book Film (a lucid, intelligent study of cinema - including popular film - at a time when there wasn't enough literature on the subject), Roger Manvell made the following observation about Charles Laughton:

“Men of the great acting quality of Laughton and [Leslie] Howard are often accused of being themselves at the expense of their parts...[but] a man is often chosen for his first lead because he has the right face and physique for the part: Laughton passed through a series of parts for all of which his physique and remarkable face were of great plastic value. He has great versatility within his own range – Henry VIII, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Quasimodo, Ginger Ted, Ruggles, all different and yet the same photogenic Laughton mannerisms in all.”

The first thing you notice when you watch Alexander Korda’s biopic Rembrandt is how closely Laughton – aided by basic makeup, including an untamed set of whiskers – resembles the great Dutch painter. But the resemblance becomes incidental after a while, as the focus shifts to the actor’s wonderfully subdued performance, several shades away from his scenery-chewing Henry VIII. But then this is a quiet film, different in tone from The Private Life of Henry VIII (also directed by Korda), which played almost like a parody by comparison. (And who could blame it, given its subject matter!)

In Rembrandt, apart from a short scene or two (such as the one where the painter, on a visit to his hometown, briefly regains some of his vigour and even gets into a brawl in a local tavern), the emphasis is on the character’s discontent: his melancholia after his wife’s death and his subsequent relationship, driven by loneliness, with a shrewish housekeeper; his difficulties in dealing with the demands made by the noblemen who commission his work; his struggle with the question of vanity and where it leads an artist ("it's no greater than and no less than when a shoemaker makes a pair of shoes" he says, responding to praise for one of his works); and his nostalgia for (but also inability to return to) his humble roots in a milling family.

This isn’t an exhaustive or well-rounded biography – it’s more like a series of snapshots (if that isn’t an inappropriate word to use in connection with a 17th century painter), starting at a point where Rembrandt, already a highly regarded artist, is in his late 30s. There aren’t many specific insights into his work, apart from an episode where he depicts members of the Civil Guard as posturing buffoons (and, when confronted, tells them “Vanity and stupidity are written all over your faces – the only distinguished things about you are your hats and breastplates”). However, there’s a key scene where he convinces a beggar to pose as King Saul. “You can’t be a good painter then,” the beggar says when approached, “Decent painters paint decent people.” But as he poses, Rembrandt tells him about Saul and David, and the beggar, now dressed as a king, is so moved (by the story of Saul being moved by David’s harp-playing) that he wipes a teardrop from his cheek with a corner of his robe. The shot powerfully connects with the real-life Rembrandt’s painting of Saul and David but it also shows a painter cleverly getting his subject “into character”. A short while later the roles will be reversed, as the beggar tries to playfully teach the artist the tricks of his own trade. (“Look miserable...but not too miserable, or they’ll think you’re past helping. When your right eye waters, let your left eye twinkle, so as they say ‘Look at that fellow, he may be starving but he’s got a merry air’.”)

Another couple of scenes like this, and Rembrandt could have been a really great film. As it stands, it’s a pretty good one. It has depth and feeling, and it’s elegantly shot in black and white; you’d think colour would be a better choice for a movie about a famous painter, but this doesn’t really make a difference, even when there are vivid references to colours, such as Rembrandt imagining what a ruby-red necklace would look like on his wife’s white neck. (Sidenote: watching the beggar-as-Saul scene, a whimsical question popped into my mind. Which is truer to life – a black-and-white photograph, or a realistically coloured painting?)

But dominating everything is the Laughton performance, his fluid face running the gamut of emotions from frustration to quiet pride to sorrow. Incidentally his real-life wife Elsa Lanchester plays Hendrickje, the woman with whom Rembrandt finds love. She’s a fine actress but I always feel a disconnect when I see her playing anything other than the Bride of Frankenstein!

Reflections on Tati’s Play Time, and what a movie camera lets us see

2009-10-20T15:31:00.001+05:30

I had a talk once with a veteran art director, a man who handled the set design for many theatre productions at the NSD, and he spoke about the mental adjustments he had to make during a brief assignment on a movie. When doing up the interiors of a small room, he would be instructed not to bother about every square inch of space, or every shelf on every wall; the exact camera set-up had been decided beforehand and the film’s audience would only get to see a specific portion of the room. It took some time for our man to get used to this slapdash approach. After all, he had cut his teeth on lavish stage productions by Ebrahim Alkazi and others, where set design was not only of utmost importance but also had to be treated holistically: what if a viewer chanced to look at a prop placed at the edge of the set, instead of fixing his gaze on the centrestage action?

But of course, unlike the theatregoer, a movie viewer is at the mercy of what the camera chooses to show him. This is self-evidently true for films that have rapid-fire cuts or camera swooshes – but it can be equally true for sober productions like (for example) Hitchcock’s Rope, which was made up of only nine or ten long takes and set entirely in a three-room apartment. On a casual viewing, you might think Rope is like a filmed play, a “static” movie, and that as the viewer you’re in control, but this is far from the case: the camera movements are subtly orchestrated to enhance the suspense at key moments; the movement of characters from one room to another and the placement of props (notably the wooden chest that is the focal point of the action) are strategically planned. It’s really a very “cinematic” film (in the widely used and restrictive sense of the word “cinematic”, but more on that later).

Watching Jacques Tati’s Play Time reminded me of this chat about the freedom available to a theatre viewer vis-à-vis a movie viewer. Tati’s film is a work that demands multiple viewings if you want to appreciate it fully, for the simple reason that many sequences have several different bits of action going on within the same frame (and most people have only one pair of eyes). There are fixed long shots where the viewer is free to look at whatever he chooses, and this freedom is heightened by the fact that the film has no “story” as such; it’s made up entirely of tiny sub-plots. (Synopsis: a number of people, including many tourists, wander about a large airport, an office complex and a trade exhibition in a Paris that's all pristine glass-and-concrete buildings; as if intimidated by the architecture, they walk in straight lines and turn at right angles. The “old” Paris, with its sightseeing attractions such as the Eiffel Tower, is never seen directly, only reflected in glass windows as if it occupies a parallel universe. Eventually, most of these people and a few others go to a posh dinner party, where things get increasingly busy. That's pretty much it.)

There are no protagonists whose actions can serve as focal points for us – instead, several groups of people walk in and out of the frame, so that some of their faces gradually become familiar (though never too familiar) to the viewer. Tati himself does play his trademark role, the kindly, distracted Monsieur Hulot, bumbling about the place with his pipe and his umbrella, but even Hulot is just one of the many characters, not the centre of attention (apart from two early scenes). All this adds up to an unsettling, even distancing experience for the first-time viewer. Even in a film by Ozu, where a camera might unblinkingly record a whole sequence from a fixed position, there is at least a definite narrative: in a lengthy medium shot of a crowded room, we would know what to watch out for, whom to direct our eyes towards. But Play Time offers no such cues, especially in the superb 45-minute-long restaurant sequence that takes up most of the movie’s second half.

With its eye-popping accumulation of characters – diners, waiters, bouncers, musicians, a maître d’ – all busy doing different things, and a gradual transition from controlled order into chaos, this is one of the greatest movie setpieces I’ve seen; it's so intricate, the mind boggles at how difficult the whole thing must have been to conceptualise, rehearse and shoot. Light and good-natured though the sequence is, I also thought it had some of the dark, anarchic force of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, which begins with a group of sophisticates engaging in polite, superficial conversation and ends with the breakdown of civilisation. Tati’s vision is cheerier: when things spiral out of control in Play Time, the effect is liberating, as if the warmth of human nature has been allowed to break through a cold, sterile world. And there is plenty of liveliness in this long sequence: much of the joy of seeing it a second or third time comes from noticing little things – characters’ gestures, quirks of personality – that one hadn’t seen before.

A day before Play Time, I was watching another favourite film, Brian De Palma’s Sisters, an exuberant, full-blooded psychological thriller by a master of such techniques as the split-screen (used brilliantly in this film) – and a master also at the art of using camera movement to conceal things from the viewer (or, in some cases, to give us half-glimpses of things that we can’t be quite sure about). De Palma is one of the great visual storytellers, and I think he was once quoted as saying he had little patience with films that depended too much on words; films that were “basically just pictures of people talking”. I wonder what he thought of Play Time, a film that contains hardly any dialogue (and doesn’t at all rely on words to get its point across) but which is also, visually speaking, static and minimalist – at least when compared to De Palma’s own kinetic, highly stylised approach to moviemaking.

Personally speaking, I’m very grateful for both types of movies. And the many other types in between.

P.S. As you can see this is a rambling sort of post, but I'd appreciate any thoughts on the subject of the camera-viewer relationship, or tips about films that resemble Play Time in style or concept.

Not this, not this: Anjum Hasan's Neti, Neti

2009-10-17T11:13:00.000+05:30

[Did a version of this review for Crest]

Anjum Hasan’s first novel Lunatic in my Head – one of the solidest, most assured debuts I've read in a long time – was about three people, unrelated to each other, living in Shillong and stifled in different ways by the pace of life in this misty northeastern city. One of those characters was an eight-year-old girl named Sophie Das, who spent much of her time in the world of her imagination. "Fat raindrops flecked her glasses and things turned blurry; car lights melted into streaks of gold, people were coloured blobs, bobbing on the surface of the world's dark sea."

In Hasan’s new novel Neti, Neti, Sophie has the floor to herself and her world is still in many ways a blur, though the setting has changed. She's 25 and has been in Bangalore for a year at the point the book opens, working for a US-based company that outsources the subtitling of DVDs (dialogue-transcribing, background sounds for the hearing-impaired) to India. This life is faster-paced than Sophie’s life in Shillong was – it’s a world of glitzy malls, late-night parties and office politics, a consumerist culture where people regularly spend beyond their means (an important subplot is about the repercussions of people defaulting on loans). Her boyfriend Swami – to whom she tries to introduce one of her favourite books, R K Narayan’s Swami and Friends - works in a call centre and keeps American time. Sophie has, in a sense, moved from one country to another; we are reminded that the north-east is frequently thought of as not being part of India at all. (At one point, beginning a journey from Bangalore to Shillong, she sleepily thinks to herself, “I’m not coming back to India”.)

This is a book with a dry, often dark sense of humour, especially in the sections where Sophie has to deal with a conservative landlord who frowns on a single woman coming home late at night (and who demands that she “remove her underwear” from the clothesline). Or the passage where she reluctantly attends a satsang - a spiritual meet held in honour of a new-age Guru – with freshly purchased beer bottles nestled in her bag. (It probably says something about me that I chuckled out loud at a passage that introduces the bereaved parents of a little boy who died in a mall, but the context, involving a clueless character who is trying too hard to enliven proceedings, really does make it funny.) It’s also a book of vignettes and moods, with chapter titles that often reflect Sophie’s state of mind, and in this it briefly reminded me of David Mitchell’s excellent, underrated novel Black Swan Green.

I thought Neti, Neti was an easier read than the introspective Lunatic in my Head, which was driven more by the interior lives of its three characters than by plot movement. This could partly be because the tones of the two books were dictated by their respective settings: the first was about feeling weighed down in a city where nothing seems to move, while this one is set in a world where too much seems to be going on at once. But this isn’t a facile tale about a young girl attaining personal freedom, escaping to a more liberal world and having the time of her life. Bangalore and Shillong, located 3,000 km apart, may represent two very different aspects of the Indian experience, but there are contradictions within each of these worlds as well, and Hasan’s precise, controlled prose does a fine job of portraying Sophie’s disaffection with both the places she has known. (The book’s lovely title is a Vedic chant that means “Not This, Not This”, but this literal translation doesn’t quite capture the deep sense of restlessness, the world-weariness, evoked by the phrase; the sense of never quite being satisfied by anything.)

There has been a debate in Indian literary circles recently around a magazine essay that claimed our fiction lacks ambition and a sense of the Larger Issues – that it’s more about navel-gazing than anything else. This is a simple-minded argument to begin with (and it deserved to be explored in a much larger space than the 900 or so words that were available to the article), but Hasan’s two books, taken together, are good examples of how the personal can give depth and shade to the bigger picture; how individual lives can be used to map the life of this vast, varied country and the many subcultures that coexist within it.

The Pushkar Literature Festival...

2009-10-15T20:31:00.000+05:30

...is happening on October 31. Just a day long, but there are some good sessions scheduled, and it's part of the annual Pushkar fair, which means lots of exciting side-shows. Full programme here.

More on DVD commentaries, and Polanski's baby dolls

2009-10-13T11:55:00.001+05:30

I've written earlier about my love for DVD extras, especially audio commentaries by the people who worked on a film, or video introductions by enthusiasts. I don't get to see as many of these things as I'd like (given general lack of time and the fact that the priority, sadly, is to watch the actual film first, with its own soundtrack!), but when I do I’m reminded that well-put-together extras can be a real education for any movie buff. This is one reason why I prefer to buy DVDs from Palika Bazaar (or from the legit outlets when there's a generous sale on) rather than look for online streams.

Some enjoyable DVD experiences I've had in the last few days:

- watching Jacques Tati's magnificent Play Time with selected scene commentary by movie historian Philip Kemp, as well as a video introduction by Terry Jones, both of whom assure us that the only way to see - really see - Tati's grand 70 mm vision is on a big screen. And even then, Play Time is a movie that needs multiple viewings if you want to appreciate everything that's going on: there’s plenty of detail in nearly every frame, lots of long shots where different sets of characters can be seen doing different things. (I've seen it twice on a 25-inch screen; now I can't escape the feeling that I haven't really seen it at all.)

- A short Introduction by Orson Welles to D W Griffith's Intolerance (one of my prize acquisitions). Welles tells us in his deep, sardonic voice that “much too much literature is written on the subject of movies. And a lot of it has been written about me, as it's written about all sorts of people who don't deserve it, and they give me credit for innovations that I'm not responsible for...but the film you're going to watch now deserves all the credit possible...there's almost nothing in the entire vocabulary of cinema that you won't find in it”. I'm reminded of James Agee gushing that “to watch Griffith's work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination, and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art.”

- An interview with director Mike Figgis about Godard's Weekend (a film that, incidentally, was made around the same time as Play Time and dealt with a similar theme - alienation in the modern world - though in a very, very different way). Also, audio commentary by critic David Sterritt, who has interesting things to say about the shooting of some of the film's key scenes, such as the lengthy, eye-popping shot of a traffic jam on a country road.

- On my DVD of Roman Polanski's Repulsion, there’s a commentary track featuring Polanski and Catherine Deneuve, who played the neurotic young Carol, plagued by nightmares and hallucinations in a London apartment. This isn't a case of the participants sitting together in a room watching the movie and talking to each other; Polanski's and Deneuve's observations were recorded separately, and they discuss different scenes. When it comes to the scene where Carol sits on a sofa with her nightdress bunched well over her knees while her middle-aged landlord looks down at her leeringly, this is what Deneuve has to say:

I think that's the image Roman had of Carol - like a Baby Doll, being like a little girl but not realising or not wanting to see that she had a body, that she could be sitting in a position that was normal to her but was indecent to men, and attractive to them at the same time. That's very much Roman...an image which mixes innocence with perversion. He has a great desire for showing very young women in love scenes because I think his impression of love is related to purity and virginity in a way. In all his films you find that image of the woman being very pure and romantic and naive, and the object of desire.

No, I’m not turning this into a simple game of Connect the Dots, given the Polanski-Geimer controversy - and besides, a lot has already been written about the nature of sexuality in Polanski’s films and how it connects with his private life. But I thought it was an interesting bit of business nevertheless. Also see this photograph of Polanski directing Deneuve in Repulsion.

[Some other DVD-related posts here, here and here. And earlier posts on two of my favourite Polanski movies: Macbeth and Fearless Vampire Killers]

Dog's little soldiers + how to count

2009-10-11T09:49:00.000+05:30

From a newspaper article today about how caring Delhiites can be:

Delhiites are a compassionate lot when it comes to stray dogs. The survey says 66 per cent of the respondents actively feed dogs.

The reasons given are here:

"My panditji has asked me to feed a black dog."

"I feel I do good business when the first thing I do in the morning is feed the dog sitting in front of my office."

That's it, just those two reasons; or maybe there were others but the paper felt they were too boring/irrelevant to include. Also, no mention of whether panditji asked the respondent to spell "dog" with an extra "g" to ensure even more good luck. ("If you do this, you will record a bestselling hip-hop album and become quickly rich. That will be Rupees Five Thousand for consultation please.")

While on newspapers, can someone please teach Mr Bachchan a thing or two about the concept of birthdays? The man has been wagging his finger at journalists and telling them that today is his 68th, not his 67th - with the result that this is what has been widely reported. Um, wrong. If you were born on this day in 1942, you turn 67 (2009 minus 1942) today. "Turning 67" or "celebrating your 67th birthday" is another way of saying that you have completed 67 full years of existence. Which means you will begin your 68th year tomorrow. But it's still your 67th birthday today.

In other words, the day you were born was NOT your first birthday. It's a bit confusing at first, but it shouldn't be too hard to grasp for someone who read and understood the scripts of films like Eklavya: The Royal Guard and Sarkar Raj.

Short take: The Man Who Swam the Amazon

2009-10-09T15:29:00.000+05:30

[Did this for Outlook Traveller]

“At times I’m convinced he’s some sort of swimming robot,” river guide Matthew Mohlke says of Martin Strel, and it’s easy to see why. Strel, the Slovenian endurance swimmer, is a fearless conqueror of great rivers, the holder of the Guinness records for swimming the Yangtze, the Mississippi, the Danube and finally, in 2007, the Amazon. The Man Who Swam the Amazon is an account of the last of those marathons, a potentially deadly 3,274-mile journey that took 66 days.

This isn’t a travel book in the conventional sense; we learn the names of various anchoring spots along the river in Peru, Brazil and Columbia, but no real details about most of these places – which are hardly regular tourist attractions anyway! It’s more a collection of diary entries recording each day of the swim. Few of these entries run longer than two or three pages and this makes for a quick read, but it also means that things get repetitive – for all the fear of river pirates, crocodiles and other predators, there are days when nothing very exciting happens. Mohlke gets around this by detailing the many challenges facing the crew on the support boat: outdated maps (in a terrain that can barely be mapped anyway); the need to store buckets of rancid pig’s blood to divert attacking piranhas, and condoms to protect against the notorious candiru fish, which have a nasty tendency to make themselves comfortable in the human urethra; constant bouts with illness; the shifting moods and personal equations on board.

I wished the book contained more passages like Mohlke’s warm description of a logrolling competition between him and Strel during a rare, lighthearted moment in between swims. But he does give us a few snippets about Strel’s life and describes how the swimmer deals with the exhausting sessions in the water: by telling himself stories for long stretches of time, cutting himself off from the world around him and retreating into personal memory palaces. Even as the support crew is armed with laptops and other modern equipment (something Mohlke admits to feeling ambivalent about, because it seems to take away some of the purity of this primal journey), Strel single-mindedly ploughs on, spending up to 12 hours each day in the water. “It’s just him and the river. It’s like the whole world collectively sleepwalks through their day-to-day routine and he’s the only one left on the planet who’s still living like a caveman.” This is a very lightweight book, but in these passages at least it creates a portrait of a portly, middle-aged man who dreamt a mad dream and then went on to live it.

Breadside manner

2009-10-06T15:55:00.000+05:30

Spotted in Rishikesh this weekend, the Dr Burger restaurant:

Click to enlarge. In case you still can't read the text underneath the topmost "Dr Burger", it says "Be Happy if U Feel Hungry".

Actually, just seeing this banner was enough to make me feel happy. It's strange on so many levels, especially in a town that's all-vegetarian. Does this restaurant cater only to doctors? Or do you require a doctor's services after consuming their food? Or do they serve burgers with doctors inside them? If so, were the doctors vegetarian? Best of all is the random little penguin figure at the bottom. Is it the restaurant's logo? If so, why? If not, why is it there?

People go to Rishikesh seeking answers, but I only find more questions.

[More Rishikesh pictures - from three years ago - here. And some perplexing signboards from Mussoorie here.]

Neti, Neti at CMYK

2009-10-04T19:08:00.001+05:30

A quick shout-out for a new bookstore and a fine new book: Anjum Hasan’s second novel Neti, Neti (Not This, Not This) is being launched this week and I’ll be speaking with her about it at the newly opened CMYK book shop in the Meher Chand Market on 7th October, at 7 pm.

I wrote about Hasan’s first novel Lunatic in my Head here. Sophie Das – who was an eight-year-old living in Shillong (and in the world of her own imagination) in the first book – is a young woman of 25 in Neti, Neti. She has been living and working in Bangalore for a year, having effectively moved from one country to another, and Hasan does an excellent job of portraying her growing disaffection with both her present and her past life. The second novels of writers who scored a hit with their first are often disappointing, but this one isn’t. I thought it was an easier read than Lunatic in my Head (which isn’t meant as a judgement on either book) and this may partly be because their tones are dictated by their respective settings: Lunatic... was about three people feeling weighed down in a city where nothing ever seems to move, while Neti, Neti is set in a world where too much seems to be going on at once.

Come for the event if you can. And do look out for the book.

Dus Kahaniyan, Polish style: Kieslowski's Dekalog

2009-09-30T16:57:00.000+05:30

[Putting up some of my recent columns; this one was for the Sunday Business Standard]

Many DVD-enthusiasts I know have begun wading in the vast ocean that goes by the generic name “World Cinema”, and one of the first things they discover is the Three Colours trilogy, made by the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski (whose films are as simple and direct as his first name is daunting). But of late, I've noticed a growing interest among friends in an earlier Kieslowski work: the 10-part Dekalog (The Decalogue), which was made as a series of television episodes in the late 1980s. The reason for this interest, apparently, is director Vishal Bharadwaj, who has repeatedly referred to Dekalog as being a huge influence on his career as a film-buff and filmmaker.

Visually and thematically speaking, there is little to link Bharadwaj’s recent films (the energetic Kaminey in particular) with Kieslowski’s work, but that’s one of the charming things about movie influences – they don’t have to be blindingly obvious, with clearly connecting dots and “Aha!” moments. (Is anyone else fed up of the repeated channeling of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie whenever Bhardwaj’s latest is discussed?) It’s a reminder that entirely disparate films and filmmaking styles can call out to each other across space and time.

Kieslowski is, along with Satyajit Ray and Eric Rohmer, among the gentlest directors I know, and his best work is marked by a similarly intense, careful engagement with people’s lives and personal dilemmas. His movies aren’t cinematic in the flashier sense of the word – the camerawork is mostly at the service of narrative and dialogue, the editing is practically invisible – but they have a quiet, hypnotic quality that draws a viewer in; his use of close-ups is outstanding, and I can’t think of an instance of poor casting in any of his films. Each of the 10 films in Dekalog is around an hour long, set in a middle-class apartment block in Warsaw, and each of them is a modern-day reworking of one of the Ten Commandments. Thus, “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me” becomes a story about a staunchly rationalist professor whose over-reliance on the data provided by his computer leads to tragedy. “Thou shalt not kill” becomes a study of a young murderer facing the death penalty (in an episode that would later be expanded into a longer feature titled A Short Film About Killing). And “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” is turned into a story about a conversation between a Holocaust survivor and the professor who had once refused to give her shelter. But you don't have to keep a specific commandment in mind while watching the film it corresponds to – this isn't a game of "connect the dots".

Kieslowski was agnostic himself, but he was very interested in the relationship between people and their faith, as well as the concepts of sin and punishment. The stories in Dekalog aren't morality tales with an obvious “message” or lesson; there is nothing one-dimensional about the situations they depict, many of which fall well outside the ambit of the Bible's Commandments. In one episode, for instance, a woman considers aborting the child she has conceived out of wedlock, but only if a doctor can assure her that her ill husband has a good chance of survival. What adds another shade to this story is that the doctor’s response is coloured by a tragic incident from his own past. As this painful story unfolds, it becomes obvious that the director is more interested in human beings than in stone tablets.

Dekalog can be slow going at times, especially for viewers who get impatient with movies driven more by content than form, or built mainly around dialogue. For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend attempting to see all the films over a short period of time; a better idea would be to spread the experience over a fortnight or a month. And as a companion piece to Dekalog 1, I also recommend David Volach’s outstanding film My Father, My Lord, which I wrote about here. Both movies are about a father-son relationship that ends in tragedy and both are critiques of rigidity of thought - but they approach the subject from opposite ends of the spectrum and complement each other perfectly.

Extreme close-up + a launch

2009-09-28T14:18:00.001+05:30

"Just to remind you that I'm cuter than any #@%!! purebred!"

Photo clicked by the multi-talented Abhilasha Ojha, who, in addition to holding down a day job at Business Standard (and putting up with me for much of the rest of the time), has recently embarked on the business of making greeting cards. She will also be on a panel discussion later this week, at the launch of the book Sarpanch Sahib: Changing the Face of India, a collection of stories about women panchayat leaders across the country, jointly published by The Hunger Project and Harper Collins. (Abhi is one of the contributors. Manju Kapur and Urvashi Butalia are also on the panel. More about the event here.)

The post that twitted

2009-09-25T17:06:00.000+05:30

Very Twitterish post, this, possibly the first of many. Some of the things I've been doing in the past week or so:

- Ingesting excellent Beef Fry at Gunpowder. Strongly recommend it. Might not be to the taste of those who like their steaks rare or medium-rare, but the Kerala spices, very strong though they were, didn't overwhelm the flavour of the meat.

- Watching some favourite old silent films on TCM, among them King Vidor's The Crowd (a fascinating historical document, with its depiction of the New York of 80 years ago as an impersonal, soul-sapping metropolis - and this was a time when even the Empire State Building hadn't yet been constructed) and The Big Parade. Found to my alarm that I had no memory of some scenes; maybe I should start tattooing notes on my chest when I watch movies. Also saw the (definitely non-silent) classic The Mask of Fu Manchu, with Boris Karloff as the evil chin-chooing doctor and Myrna Loy (looking very amused, or so I like to tell myself) as his daughter Fah Lo See.

- Reading for pleasure every now and again. Highlights include Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery, Wodehouse's Piccadilly Jim (first read in school library circa 1988), and Pearls Before Swine anthologies. Just finished The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules, an English translation (by Robert Hueckstedt) of Manohar Shyam Joshi's Hariya Hercules ki Hairaani. The first half was brilliant but I got a bit lost towards the end. More on it soon.

- Struggling horribly with the project that I'm supposed to be spending most of my time on - big problem with writer's block, or ennui, or whatever. Trying hard to put on a brave face instead of doing the sensible thing and drowning myself in a tub of liquified Prozac.

The Lion in springtime: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

2009-09-24T15:06:00.001+05:30

Midway through Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s mammoth novelistic account of political intrigue and diplomacy in early 16th century England, there is a description of the making of spiced wafers. “The process involves a good eye, exact timing and a steady hand. There are so many points at which it can go wrong. The mixture must have the right dropping consistency, the plates of the long-handled irons must be well-greased and hot... If you miss a beat the smell of scorching permeates the air. A second divides the successes from the failures.”

This passage could just as easily be about the acuity required to survive (even if for a short while) in the boiling plate that is the court of Henry VIII, one of England’s most mercurial rulers. This is a place where people routinely go from being in enviable positions to finding their heads on the chopping block, and Mantel’s book takes us straight to the heart of a storm: the king’s desire to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon and marry the young Anne Boleyn instead, a decision that will have strong reverberations since it will lead directly to the English Reformation (the separation of the English Church from the papacy of Rome, which refused to grant Henry his annulment). Historical figures such as Cardinal Wolsey (at his peak one of the most powerful men in Britain, but also the biggest casualty of the Anne Boleyn affair), his successor as Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, and the 3rd Duke of Norfolk stride through these pages, but the central character in Mantel’s retelling is Thomas Cromwell, who rose from being a blacksmith’s son to becoming Henry’s chief minister and one of the engineers of the Reformation.

When we learn about history primarily through cold details set out “objectively” in textbooks, it’s possible to lose sight of the fact that the distant events we take for granted – events that now appear set in stone, almost as if they could have unfolded in no other way – were the accumulated products of the personalities, life experiences and whimsies of human beings who happened to be in a certain place at a certain time: real people with ambitions, weaknesses, dilemmas, biases and prejudices of their own. One of the things Mantel does wonderfully well in this book is to show how Cromwell’s life and character – in conjunction with those of the others around him – came to have a bearing on the vital events of his time.

From the beginning, Cromwell is an outsider: at age 15 he left his country to escape his violent father, and spent his youth in France and Italy (even serving in the French army for a while, something that is never forgotten even when he is most in favour). Shortly after the present-day of the novel begins, his patron Wolsey falls out of favour and then he loses his wife and daughters to the plague. Mantel’s restrained writing doesn’t stress his grief, but we sense the turmoil underneath – as we do when he enters a relationship with his late wife’s sister, a relationship which raises questions of morality that also surround the king’s liaisons with the Boleyn sisters Anne and Mary.

Cromwell’s circumstances and his detachment from the country of his birth seem to give him a certain elasticity in thought, which in turn aids his rise to power. In a telling passage, he reflects on the differences between himself and the inflexible Thomas More:

What’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away...with every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says in the Bible, ‘Purgatory’. Show me where it says relics, monks, nuns. Show me where it says ‘Pope’.

This ability to question in general – and the ability to question the authority of Rome in particular – will be vital to Cromwell’s career trajectory. But the above passage is also a reminder of how “perspective tellings” can bring nuance to historical events. Mantel’s portrayal of the antagonism between Cromwell and More is significantly different from that in Robert Bolt’s famous play A Man for All Seasons, which had More as the tragic, upright hero and Cromwell as his cunning nemesis. (Note: I haven't read the play but I've seen the very faithful movie version.) Which of these portrayals is truer to the real thing? Even if we had access to a time machine, we probably wouldn’t get a satisfactory answer to that question. More to the point, it may not be very important.

Of course, history can turn not just on clashes of ideology and character but on bedroom shenanigans as well – on a king’s hunger for a woman who is withholding herself from him. The Tudors were a horny lot and there is a lot of casual bawdiness in this book. People gossip about whether Anne Boleyn is a virgin and how far she has let the king go. (“She is selling herself by the inch,” says one, “She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee...Anne has very long legs. By the time he comes to her secret part [the king] will be bankrupt.”) There is discussion of maidenheads, of who has done it with whom, and of the promiscuity of the French. A committee of elderly men is required to think up ways in which the marriage between Henry and Katherine might have been only “partly consummated”, so as not to make a liar of either party. Reading some of this made me think that perhaps the film The Private Life of Henry VIII was not as broadly caricatured as its reputation suggests.

Mantel mostly uses formal contemporary language (her epitaph “To my singular friend Mary Robertson this be given” is more old-world than almost anything in the actual text) and she locates humour in unexpected places, as in the passage where the unhappy, exiled Wolsey is met by a messenger bearing words of solace from the king. Weeping in gratitude for this unexpected – and ultimately hollow – act of kindness, Wolsey realises he has no gift he can send back for Henry. “He looks around him, as if his eye might light on something he can send; a tree?” (When he eventually does settle on a gift, it’s a laugh-out-loud moment.) This richly tragi-comic passage also includes a very modern-sounding remark about the manufacturing of reliquaries that are passed off as pieces of the True Cross.

Stylistically, a minor irritant is Mantel’s use of the pronoun “he” for Cromwell as if it were a synonym for his name, even in passages where two or more male figures are present and where it isn’t self-evident who the “he” refers to. In principle this is a good way of keeping the reader tied to Cromwell’s consciousness (the book never leaves him), but the device hinders lucidity in places, so that you have to reread a paragraph (and perhaps the one before it too) to make sure you’ve correctly understood a conversation or sequence of events. As if it weren’t hard enough on the reader that so many of the men in this story are named Thomas and so many of the women, Mary!

Wolf Hall presupposes a reader’s familiarity with the basic facts of Henry VIII’s reign; given its vast canvas of characters and complicated interrelationships, it helps to have more than a passing knowledge of the period (I had to consult a couple of encyclopaedia entries early on). It’s useful, for instance, to know that one of the book's peripheral characters – the young lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour – will eventually become another of Henry’s brides and that her destiny will be closely tied to Cromwell’s (this isn’t covered in the novel’s time-span, but the ending points towards it); that Anne Boleyn’s baby daughter – a source of disappointment to a court desperately awaiting a male heir – will become Elizabeth I; and that Cromwell himself, though he ends this book at the height of his powers, will eventually meet with the same fate as Thomas More did. This may be a 650-page book, but it’s always aware that it covers only a tiny sliver of a fascinating period. This makes the abrupt ending - with Cromwell left suspended in time, seemingly on the brink of even more compelling events - all the more apt.

On Chintu-ji, and a Q&A with Ranjit Kapoor

2009-09-21T11:53:00.004+05:30

Ranjit Kapoor’s film Chintuji had a very low-key theatrical release earlier this month; almost predictably, it lasted only a week. This is a pity, for Chintuji is a charming movie that deserved a bigger audience – and probably would have been appreciated by that bigger audience if it had got the right kind of publicity (I don’t think any of the major newspapers carried reviews). I watched it on Tata Sky’s “Showcase” yesterday, though I don’t know how long it will show on that channel either.

Chintuji is a couple of films in one. The better of these is a parable about small-town life in danger of being corrupted by the world outside. This isn't, of course, a new theme but it's done here with restraint and economy, right from the very compact opening scenes where we are introduced to the residents of a town called Halbahedi. They turn to the camera and speak with quiet pride about their town; they know they don’t have all the conveniences of modern life (they get electricity only eight out of 24 hours a day, the local newspaper is published only once a week) but things will gradually improve – and, after all, “baaki sab theek hai”. One of them pointedly says, “You city-dwellers think of us as a village, but we’re not, we’re a town.” It’s a beautiful, idyllic place and there’s even a small airplane landing strip nearby – so what if it isn’t technically theirs, being named for a larger, neighboring town called Trihalla?

The second film within Chintuji is a commentary on the nature of celebrity, and it begins with the discovery that the actor Rishi Kapoor was born in Halbahedi in 1952. Since Rishi – or “Chintuji” – now has his sights on a political career, this makes for good press – an opportunity to present himself as a “son of the soil” – and he arrives in Halbahedi with a contingent that includes a public-relations agent, Devika (played by the feisty, likable Kulraj Randhawa). But the star is a spoilt brat: he complains about the food, the (lack of) air-conditioning and just about anything else he can think of, and he is completely unmindful of how the townsfolk are bending over backwards to accommodate him. He does approve of a 35-foot wooden stand-up of him, though: after all, in Allahabad they only have a 25-foot stand-up of Amitabh Bachchan, and Chennai has only a 30-foot Rajinikanth figure.

Though Chintuji has just been released, it was completed in 2007 and in some ways it anticipates the self-referencing we've been seeing so much of in Bollywood recently, notably in Luck by Chance and Billu Barber. Rishi Kapoor has had a commendable second wind as an actor in the past 2-3 years, and this is one of the best performances I’ve seen from him in a while. He is "Rishi Kapoor" here and the film makes references to his roles in movies like Chandni, and to his wife "Neetu-ji" (who is busy vacationing in Switzerland!), but he isn't so much playing himself as he's playing a version of any big star who has become disconnected from the fact that he owes his success to the adoration of the "little people" – the people that he dismissively refers to as "my fans".

It’s also a brave performance when you consider how fact merges with fiction in this film. Rishi wasn’t really born in Halbahedi, but Chintuji appears to validate this idea with a photograph of Raj and Krishna Kapoor holding their baby. And one of the most affecting scenes involves a brief appearance by Kseniya Ryabinkina, the Russian dancer who played the role of Marina in Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker (which was the 16-year-old Rishi Kapoor’s first movie). Again, Ryabinkina plays not quite herself but a variant on herself: when she hands Rishi a book of photos from the Mera Naam Joker set and the music of "Jaane Kahan Gaye Woh Din" plays gently in the background, we get a moment that should enchant any Hindi-movie buff. The facile “message” of this scene (“Your father was a great artiste, but he was a greater human being,” she tells Chintu) is almost beside the point compared to the pleasure of seeing these two performers improbably together on screen again after 40 years.

I thought Chintuji was a film of vignettes rather than a consolidated whole; it's episodic and has the feel of TV serials such as Nukkad. The sub-plot about a newspaper editor (Priyanshu Chatterjee) with a possibly murky past isn’t too interesting, but there’s a lot else to enjoy, including a drily funny scene about the shooting of a B-grade tribal movie that "Chintuji" is acting in. This is where Sophie Chaudhry gets to lip-sync to one of the strangest songs you’ve ever heard in a Hindi film, its lyrics made up entirely of the names of famous movie directors. It’s safe to say that this is the first and last time a Hindi-movie song will contain the lines “Wyler, Hitchcock, Wajda / Mizoguchi, Coppola...” – the song will, of course, sound like gibberish to anyone who isn’t familiar with the names. There’s no point to it exactly, but it’s eye-popping (and ear-popping) fun.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I’ve spoken a couple of times with Ranjit Kapoor in the past few months (in another context), though that has nothing to do with the above review; if I hadn’t liked Chintuji, I wouldn’t have written about it. Though this is Ranjit’s first film as a director (at age 61), he has worn many hats over the course of a distinguished theatre and screen career. National School of Drama (NSD) alumni still speak with awe about his staging of plays like Woyzeck, Bichhu and Mukhya Mantri. He has written the dialogue for such movies as Jaane bhi do Yaaro, Bandit Queen and The Rising, and composed music for others like Aadharshila. I did a short Q&A with him about Chintuji for Business Standard a few weeks ago. (I hadn't seen the film at the time.) Here it is:

After decades of experience as a stage director, why did it take you so long to make your first film?
There were offers in the mid-80s but there was also interference by producers and I was very rigid too – I wanted the creative freedom to do what I felt was right without being told to cast so-and-so actor or to put this many songs in the film. Having come from a theatre background, I identified more with strugglers; I didn’t want big stars doing roles they weren’t suitable for.
Around 1984, Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah had been signed up for a comic thriller I had written, a mystery set over one night, but there were too many demands from the producers and it never got off the ground. I was told to use Jagjit Singh's music for a film that required a very different soundtrack. Later, Yash Chopra asked me to direct a film version of the play Ek Ruka Hua Faisla, which I had staged, but I was facing a few personal problems at the time. Eventually, Basu Chatterji did the film.

So you returned to the theatre?
Yes, I returned to Delhi, to NSD, and did the kind of work where I knew I could be in control. Theatre satisfied my creative urge and made me feel like a king. Of course, I went to Bombay when there was a decent offer – such as writing Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na with Kundan Shah, with whom I had worked on Jaane bhi do Yaaro. And also for Bandit Queen, which I wrote after shifting to Gwalior and locking myself in a hotel room for 17 days.

How did Chintuji come about?
It came from this idea I had that if even a moderately well-known actor goes to a small village for a shoot, he becomes an object of respect and awe. His presence can change their lives, for good and for bad. There’s potential in this situation for examining reality and illusion, the screen image and the real person, and I thought Rishi Kapoor, a wonderfully spontaneous actor, would make an interesting subject. He was very enthusiastic when I told him I wanted to do a script based partly on his life.
Around the same time, producer Bobby Bedi saw an open-air play I had directed in Pune and was impressed – he told me “Aapne toh iss stage setting mein film bana di.” ("You've taken this simple set and turned it into a movie set".) So things came together.

Would you call Chintuji a comedy?
It’s a comedy all right but it isn’t slapstick or farce; it draws on the little moments of humour in daily life. You won’t find the actors explicitly playing a scene for laughs. And it does get emotional towards the end – there’s a bittersweet quality to it. It’s a small film, but what I’m proud about is that it’s original – no “borrowed” ideas.

How did you get Kseniya Ryabinkina to appear in the film?
I was watching Mera Naam Joker [in which the young Rishi Kapoor had a small role] and it struck me that I would like to trace this actress, to make her a part of this story. We made enquiries, found out that she had been with the Bolshoi Ballet, and we finally contacted her in France. She plays a key role here in the development of Rishi Kapoor’s character – I won’t reveal it, go and see for yourself!

Scattered thoughts on Inherit the Wind

2009-09-17T17:47:00.000+05:30

Even when you’re aware of the extent of Christian fundamentalism in America, it’s surprising to read this news item about the British film Creation not finding distributors in the US because Charles Darwin and evolution are still considered loaded subjects. I was talking recently with a friend about religious intolerance/sensitivity in India probably being greater today than it was 50 years ago, when a revered prime minister was known to be agnostic; today, it’s highly doubtful that an Indian PM or a state chief minister (in north or central India at least) would be able to criticize organised religion or the idea of a personal God as sharply as Nehru did in Discovery of India (a book that was recommended reading for the country’s youngsters). Perhaps this is true of the US too.

A few days ago I re-watched a favourite old film, Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind, about the trial of a schoolteacher arrested for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The movie is based on the real-life Scopes Trial of 1925 and it stars one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors, the 60-year-old Spencer Tracy, as a rationalist lawyer who defends the schoolteacher, fiercely challenges literalist interpretations of the Bible and refers to the Book in a decidedly offhand manner. In light of recent developments, this film seems more topical and bolder than ever.

Stanley Kramer (whose work I wrote about in this post) wasn’t renowned for cinematic inventiveness – his films were mainly issue-based, with lots of dialogue – but Inherit the Wind opens with a sinister, visually striking scene, as the camera draws back from the Hillsboro Courthouse. A group of men silently walk across deserted streets, the opening credits appear and the soundtrack plays the gospel song “Give Me That Old-Time Religion”, its lyrics a paean to unquestioning belief:

That old-time religion...
If it’s good enough for Joshua,
It’s good enough for me
If it’s good enough for dad and mother,
It’s good enough for me...

The men are joined by a reverend and there’s something menacing about the group – they’re like a sheriff's posse in a Western, heading in single formation for a shootout, or to haul in a notorious criminal. It turns out that this isn’t far from the truth, except that the “criminal” in question is the mild-mannered teacher Bertram Cates, and his crime is explaining Darwin’s theory to his students and encouraging them to think for themselves.

For townsfolk living in America’s “Bible Belt”, such an act is intolerable. It’s also against the law that states that nothing that contradicts the Bible’s version of Creation can be taught in a school. The incident draws countrywide attention and gets politicized; the veteran conservative politician Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) is called in to prosecute Cates, while the liberal-rights champion Henry Drummond (Tracy) leads the defence. For the duration of the trial, the town turns into a carnival, with barkers sitting about displaying chained monkeys to people and handing out placards that say “I’m not descended from no ape!” and “Don’t monkey with us”. Meanwhile, inside the courthouse, the two men go hammer and tongs at each other. “Is nothing holy to you?” asks the exasperated Brady at one point. “Yes. The individual human mind,” replies Drummond. “In a child's power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘amens’ and ‘holy holies’ and ‘hosannas’.”

“An idea,” he continues, “is a greater monument than a cathedral.” This is the nub of the film – Drummond’s impassioned defence of the schoolteacher’s right to think and question, and to encourage others to do the same. "The Bible is a good book," he says, "but it is not the only book."

More than one critic has said that Inherit the Wind scores an easy victory against Creationists by turning Brady – the exemplar of the religious fundamentalist – into a soft target, a caricature. My two responses to this: 1) Anyone who sincerely believes that the earth was created at 9 AM on October 23rd, 4004 BC, and who tries to throw someone else into jail for teaching an alternate theory, is already a "caricature" beyond anything that the drunkest scriptwriter can create (also see Poe’s Law, which states that a parody of a religious fundamentalist can be indistinguishable from the real thing), and 2) Though Brady is deservedly portrayed as a pompous, closed-minded old fool in the courtroom scenes where he gives speeches and stirs up the general public sentiment, the film spares time to show shades to his character. One of the most moving scenes in the film is the one where he quietly admonishes a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher for being too harsh on his daughter (though again, his objection is voiced in Biblical terms): "I know you speak from the great zeal of your faith,” he says, “but it is possible to be over-zealous, to destroy that which you ought to save, so that nothing is left but emptiness...He that troubleth his own house will inherit the wind.”

The other great sequence in this vein – and I insist that it's great, even though it plays like a scene that was carefully designed to give two giants of American acting a non-antagonistic moment together – is the one where Drummond and Brady sit together on two rocking chairs late one evening, more old friends reliving the past than courtroom adversaries. "Why is it that you’ve moved so far away from me?" asks Brady. "Maybe it’s you who moved away by standing still," Drummond says laconically. Understanding the implication of this remark, Brady replies that he has no time for “progress” if it means abandoning God. Then he gets reflective, and you see a shadow moving beneath the surface of the Bible-thumper. "These are simple people," he says, “they are poor, they work hard and they need to believe in something ...something beautiful...something more perfect than what they have, like a golden chalice of hope.” (It's an argument often employed by those who believe that religion is essential for the world; even if you don’t agree with the argument, you believe that Brady does.)

“In other words, they’re window-shopping,” snaps Drummond, and he gets the final word with a story about a beautiful rocking horse he had coveted as a child, which turned out to be made of rotting wood. “All shine and no substance, and that’s how I feel about your religion. As long as a prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it.”

March and Tracy are both superb in this scene (arguably even better than in their more flamboyant courtroom confrontations), which is all about two actors listening carefully to each other and reacting, with smiles, grimaces and nods of the head, rather than thinking about their own lines.

In praise of Fredric March

When two different acting styles – one subdued, the other loud – occupy the same frame, there's a kneejerk tendency in some circles to rate the former more highly, even when both performances are completely true to the characters being portrayed. Note: I'm not talking here about personal preference or sympathy for a character. It's one thing to prefer Amitabh's Jai over Dharmendra's Veeru because the former is quiet, intense and ultimately tragic while the latter is boisterous and gets his girl. But it's quite another thing to devalue Dharmendra's superb performance because you're confusing the unsubtlety of the character with that of the actor, or because Veeru's cartoonish romantic exploits don't pull at your heartstrings the way Jai's wooing of the widow does. (Longer post about Dharmendra in Sholay here.)

Fredric March's Brady in Inherit the Wind is a classic example of the sort of performance I'm talking about. It's unsubtle, it plays to the gallery, it's marked by very visible and repetitive character tics ... and it's utterly authentic. Brady is, above all, a showman: as a rabble-rousing politician who has run thrice for president and made numerous self-aggrandizing speeches over the decades, certain traits have become intrinsic to his personality, and March displays this masterfully. One of Brady’s defining mannerisms is when he thinks up a "witticism" (usually something quite banal) in response to something that has been addressed to him, and March's performance allows us to see the whole process: the light-bulb appearing over the man’s head, his “Aha!” moment, and how he ostentatiously says the words for maximum effect.

In his first scene, where he is addressing the adoring masses after arriving in Hillsboro, a man shouts out "We all voted for you, three times!" Brady initially just smiles and looks set to continue his speech, but then he does a sudden double-take, wags a finger at the man and says "I trust it was in three separate elections!" This is followed by a short laugh; it's hard to say whether this is because he's genuinely impressed by his own wit or because he's giving the audience their cue to laugh with him. You see the same thing on a number of other occasions, including when he tosses off the line “I am more interested in the Rock of Ages than in the age of rocks!”, in response to Drummond holding up a fossilized rock and asking him how old he thinks it is.

P.S. March is one of my favourite actors. He was hugely respected by critics and by his peers for his stage and screen work, but he never became part of the star system to the same extent as his contemporaries such as Tracy, Bogart and others did. For anyone interested in seeking out his work, these are some of my recommendations: Nothing Sacred (one of the best screwball comedies I’ve seen, co-starring the great Carole Lombard), A Star is Born (the first of many film versions of the story about an acting couple whose careers follow different trajectories), Death Takes a Holiday, The Best Years of Our Lives, An Act of Murder, The Iceman Cometh.

De Palma’s Hi, Mom! (and "Be Black, Baby")

2009-09-10T15:57:00.000+05:30

Tata Sky has recently added TCM, MGM, NDTV Lumiere and WB to its package of movie channels, which means I have to rethink my reluctance to watch films on TV. It’s a joy to have access to TCM again after all these years – brings back good memories of gorging on Old Hollywood on TNT in the early 1990s shortly after cable television first came in. I’ve been carefully checking schedules for the next few days on the Tata Sky menu and setting reminders, but it usually isn’t possible to keep two hours free at a specified time, given my very erratic work schedule these days. So I’ve been contenting myself with re-watching bits and pieces of movies I first saw a long time ago: the early Paul Newman-starrer Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Yearling (which turned out to be a darker film than I’d remembered – much more the story of a struggling family than a boy and his cutesy little fawn), The Merry Widow, Inherit the Wind, The Asphalt Jungle, many others.

And from a much later era, a movie that I saw in its entirety: the early Brian De Palma film Hi, Mom!, with the young, pre-stardom Robert De Niro as Jon Rubin, a would-be movie-maker who sets up a camera at his window to videotape people in the building across the street from him. But this description makes it sound like a straightforward, narrative-driven film, which it definitely isn’t.

De Palma is one of my very favourite directors and I would find it very difficult to make even a short list of scenes I love in his movies (there’s an attempt in this ancient post, but it’s woefully incomplete). His best work has an energy, an understanding of how to use the camera to manipulate an audience’s emotions, that you rarely find elsewhere. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a Hitchcock devotee, but I sometimes find myself in reluctant agreement with Pauline Kael’s assertion (in her review of De Palma’s The Fury) that “no Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense or ever went so far”. I love the way he uses devices like the split screen (notably in Blow Out, Dressed to Kill, Carrie and Snake Eyes) and other camera tricks (the superb, hallucinatory climax of Body Double) to constantly remind us that we’re watching a film, and to comment on the relationship between the movie and its audience – it isn't incidental that many of his plots involve characters who are secretly watching or being watched by others, and that some of his most thrilling scenes have the viewer (us) being made privy to something that the protagonist is unaware of.

If you’re familiar mainly with the films he made from the mid-1970s onwards (the ones that led to him being unfairly labeled as a copycat Hitchcock), you probably won’t realise what a political filmmaker he was at the start of his career. Hi, Mom! is two movies in one: the first is the (relatively) conventional narrative about Jon Rubin’s shenanigans, but the second is an enormously disturbing short film (or film-within-a-film) made in the Cinéma Vérité style. Titled “Be Black, Baby” and shot in black-and-white with a handheld camera, this radical “documentary” has black actors interviewing randomly chosen white people and trying to show them what it feels like to be black: they force them to eat "soul food" and apply shoe polish to their faces, and then things get even more claustrophobic and cringe-inducing - until, in a classic example of the tearing down of the Fourth Wall, Jon Rubin makes a sudden appearance as a policeman.

Exactly how “Be Black, Baby” ties in with the main Rubin narrative is too complicated to explain here (I’m not even sure it can be explained in realist terms) but suffice it to say that taken together, the two threads have a lot to say about an audience being forced to actively participate in the film they are viewing; to stand in the shoes of people whom they've been accustomed to watching from a safe distance (much like the documentary's white respondents who had no idea what they're in for). Hi, Mom! makes it very difficult to maintain that distance. It didn’t get wide release back in 1970, but its off-kilter take on the civil rights movement must have had a very strong impact on the few people who did see it.

P.S. Anyone who’s ever thought “Robert De Niro can’t do comedy” should watch this film, especially the bits where Jon attempts to seduce a girl by trying to be a sensitive, sexually reticent young man. (Just prior to this, they have a hilarious conversation about a movie they just watched together – a conversation that also touches on the viewer as participant; how people sometimes define themselves in terms of the films they watch.) It isn’t a brilliant, show-stopping comic performance but it has a freshness and an unselfconsciousness that you would never see from De Niro in a film like Meet the Parents. It’s an experience in watching a talented, charismatic young actor before he became subsumed into a star persona – not unlike watching Amitabh Bachchan in Anand or Reshma aur Shera. Incidentally, there are traces of De Niro’s Travis Bickle in this performance too, especially in the anarchic final scenes.

P.P.S. An earlier post on meta-movies here.

The Foxie Chronicles, contd

2009-09-08T14:21:00.000+05:30

Curious: has anyone else encountered a dog who sits like this? I'd really like to know.

This is one of the strangest things about Foxie, and we don't know exactly why she does it: is it because her hind-legs are disproportionately long (they are) or because her backside is very high (it is) or did she just pick it up through careful observation of us humans sitting on our chairs and sofas in the early days of her pupdom? My mother's unscientific view of things is that she was a mermaid in her last birth.

(Note: the photo above doesn't capture the best version of the pose, which is when she puts up just one of her hind legs on a chair seat and allows the other one to dangle. If I get a better picture at some point, I'll put it up here.)

Another possibility could be that Foxie greatly treasures her behind and wishes it to be in a state of maximum comfort always. (The first thing she does each morning is come to me for her daily back massage, turning her head sternly if the rubbing isn't vigorous enough.) But it's still not a very dog-like way of sitting.

Being long and gangly, she also has issues moving about in small spaces. One of the sofas that she likes to sit on is located 3-4 feet away from a bed that she also likes to sit on, and when she moves from one to the other there's a peculiar moment of undulation where the front part of her body is climbing up one item of furniture even while the back part is still in a state of descension. The sight reminds me of this description of the mighty dragon Glaurung in Tolkien's Unfinished Tales, from a passage where a group of people hidden in a ravine mull their prospects of survival:

"But how can he come forward so?" said Dorlas. "Lithe he may be, but he is a great dragon, and how shall he climb down the one cliff and up the other when part must again be climbing before the hinder is yet descended? And if he can so, what will it avail us to be in the wild water below?"

And while I'm on the subject, a few more pictures:

Bow-zzat?

Afternoon siesta

In which we are very aware of the camera

Expression of bliss as evening head massage occurs

How many other doggies have such a big pile of books to bury their chewy bones in?

[Click pics to enlarge. Earlier Foxie posts here, here and here]

Callooh

2009-09-04T06:18:00.004+05:30

It's been five years since this thing began. Nearly one-sixth of my life. To mark the occasion, here are five of the most pointless posts on this blog over the years. Any one of them is guaranteed to ensure that the reader never returns. (But you did, which says more about you than these posts say about me.)

- A nine-line masterpiece about a fish in a Zurich hotel. Serves absolutely no purpose other than to inform readers that I like sushi (which could easily have been done in three words).

- I donate blood and endure soggy biscuits. How gallant of me. Mainly written to remind viewers that I was spending a lot of time in hospitals.

- I go to the golf course and write a post that's nearly as scintillating as watching caddies walk around behind Jyoti Randhawa at 3 in the afternoon.

- Completely random lament with a gratuitous reference to a food blog that I never intended to start.

- This is the sort of thing that gives blogs a bad name, adding to the perception of a blogger as a social misfit who walks about with a camera in his neighborhood, taking photos of houses just so he can put up a half-witted post. The sort of thing people do on Facebook nowadays.

Anyone who wants to add to the list, feel free to browse the archives.